Improve Hiring by Turning Your Hiring Process into a Hiring Strategy

If you don't have a hiring strategy in place, don't be surprised when your hiring results aren't improving.

Understanding the hiring process.

For more than a decade, I have been running a Hiring Software company here at ApplicantPro. We began by building an Applicant Tracking System to help clients with their applicant sourcing and various other hiring needs.

At first we had a certain approach that we used when we talked to prospective hiring software clients. We would ask them to tell us about their company's hiring process which was easy for them to answer. The prospective client would then walk us through their hiring process from when an employee left the company to when HR was able to get a qualified candidate hired and onboard as a new employee.

Answers to these questions about their hiring process gave us complete visibility and documentation of a step-by-step approach to how they had been hiring on new employees. We were able to see what the HR of that company did and how they did it throughout the entire hiring process. We would then turn around and show them our ApplicantPro hiring software and explain to them how it would make that process better, faster, and easier.

Is your hiring process broken?

Eventually, we soon realized that we were missing one important point in this process. We realized that their hiring process might actually be broken and not as effective as it could be. If their hiring process wasn't giving them the results they wanted, like more qualified applicants, then what we just did was give them hiring software to make that broken process get them their bad hiring results faster.

Yes, our hiring software was helpful to these clients and it definitely freed up some of their time with HR responsibilities. We were able to build into our hiring software features that would maximize important aspects of hiring like applicant flow and speed of hiring. That was all great but in order to get the maximum hiring results, we were missing and important question: "What is your hiring strategy?"

What is a Hiring Process?

A hiring process is a strict step-by-step guide of how HR accomplishes hiring for their company. Hiring processes are great for getting the job done but if you don't stop and evaluate whether the hiring process output, the actual hiring results, are what you are wanting to accomplish, you won't know whether that hiring process is good or bad.

What is a Hiring Strategy?

A hiring strategy is different than a hiring process. A hiring strategy is about moving and improving your hiring results. Moving and improving from hiring results A to hiring results B. Actually making the hiring changes necessary to evolve how to improve the number of applicants and the quality of those new employees HR hires on. A hiring process is just one part of the hiring strategy. In fact, most of the time, when you're creating or implementing a hiring strategy, you're changing those hiring processes.

So my question for you in HR is, are you focused on just your hiring process or do you actually have a hiring strategy? In order to get a hiring strategy, there's a handful of things that you need to do. Below are steps to take to evolve your hiring process into the best hiring strategy for your company that will produce the hiring results you are looking for.

4 Steps to Developing a Hiring Strategy

1. Identify your hiring pains.

Take a look at your hiring process to identify and list out your core hiring pains or problems. 4 basic hiring pains that most companies experience are:

• Not get enough applicants.
• The applicants they do get aren't qualified for the job.
• A hiring process that is too slow.
• Hiring applicants that end up not being the best fit for the job.

Your hiring strategy then is to pick one of those hiring pains that you feel is the most important problem to solve for your company.

2. Start measuring your hiring strategy change.

Now you need to actually start to measuring your hiring strategy. You won't know if you are improving your hiring if you don't measure it. Come up with a measurement or metric around the hiring problem you want to solve. Some examples of measurement might be, "Currently our turnover is 10%," or "Currently our applicant flow is 10 per job ad."

3. Set a hiring goal that solves your hiring pain.

Once you have identified your hiring pain and have a baseline measurement for that pain, now you can decide where you want to go and set a goal. At this point, you're able to look at the hiring process but you're not looking at how the process works. You're looking at where you need to change that hiring process in order to have an impact on the hiring results. Identifying your pain, making a plan, and setting a goal now become your hiring strategy.

4. Hiring strategy question: "How might we?"

Now that your hiring pain has been identified and your strategy is forming, the last step is to ask "How might we?"

• "How might we decrease turnover?"
• "How might we change this hiring process in order to increase the number of qualified applicants for this job?"
• "How might we change what we are doing today so that what we're doing tomorrow will get us a better result?"

At the end of the day, a hiring process is all about maintaining the status quo. On the other hand, a hiring strategy is about changing and improving how you hire.

Hiring Strategy Template Download

Click to download this Hiring Strategy Template to help you and your HR team get started on improving your hiring results today!

What is your hiring strategy plan?

So what is your hiring strategy? What pain are you trying to solve? How do you measure it? What is your goal? And what are you doing differently in order to get a better result? These are all questions to ask to figure out your own hiring strategy. If you don't have a strategy in place, then you shouldn't be surprised when your results don't improve.

Job Board Maximization Hiring Strategy

Do you want a step-by-step guide to increase your applicant flow? Download our Job Board Maximization Cheat Sheet

This Job Board Maximization guide offers a different hiring strategy to the way you approach job boards. Many have a similar hiring process when it comes to job boards, which is to post and pray. That's really how many HR tackle this hiring process. They take a job, throw it on the job boards, turn around and walk away, and then they just get what they get.

A better hiring strategy than the post and pray method would be something we call Job Board Optimization. Job Board Optimization is where we look at the way job boards work and adjust our job postings with different keywords, different saturation levels, different job ads, and different approaches to how we integrate with the job boards. It's not just pushing jobs out, but also allowing job seekers to apply. This Job Board Optimization guide shows dramatic increases in job board results in the number of qualified applicants applying for jobs.

We've put together this quick and easy guide for Job Board Optimization. It's a free Job board optimization hiring strategy. This guide provides steps to increase the number of qualified applicants you get from job boards. Download it, it's free, and is guaranteed to increase the number of applicants you get by 50-300% every single time!